Cloud computing is rapidly changing the Internet into a collection of clouds, which provide a variety of computing resources, storage resources, and, in the future, a variety of resources that are currently unimagined. This new level of virtualization has unbounded the physical and geographical limitations of traditional computing. However, existing networking technology still binds virtualization software to physical limitations because it is still largely based on physical devices and manual mechanisms.
The current networking technology of today is based upon static networks and Internet Protocol (IP) based routing. So, as companies move to the new technology of Intelligent Workload Management with transparency and flexibility in their environments the traditional IP networking model fails to meet their needs.
This is so because network routing has always been separate from the software services that rely on network routing for network connectivity. Traditional network routing is done independent of the software services and has less than adequate ability to verify software logic in terms of business intelligence.
For example, if there is a financial server, then that server should not be accessible to machines that are not verified with security mechanisms in the network. With traditional approaches, the financial server is manually configured for network routing; so, hopefully someone does not plug a wrong machine address into the wrong network routing table, such that the financial server is compromised by a machine or service not authorized to access the financial server.